Description: I was the ghostwriter for Dr. Nitin Baliga, SVP at Institute for Systems Biology.
Article:
By NITIN BALIGA for the Missoulian
When scientists talk about cutting-edge research, it’s an abstract concept to most people. No subway map lights up to show you how an advancement in the lab connects via other stops, so to speak, to the care you might receive at your doctor’s office. It may take years or decades before a discovery at the laboratory bench becomes a lifesaving treatment at the bedside. People want cure-me-now immediacy, but research is grounded in the long game.
Scientists who focus on fundamental or basic research – versus clinical research – have an even tougher job of explaining how dysfunction in a molecular mechanism of a gene, for example, may make itself known through numerous interactions with other genes and processes to result in any number of diseases. That kind of biological research is quite complex. But working behind the scenes trying to unravel that complexity is exactly what researchers in systems biology face every day.
To understand what that means, it helps to have some context for what constitutes a complex system. An airplane, for example, contains many interacting parts. None of the individual parts possesses properties of the whole system, but when the fuselage, wings, rudders, engines and hundreds of thousands of parts come together, they culminate in the ability to fly people around the world. We call this an “emergent property.”
It’s a clear example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, because the plane (whole) can fly, while the wings and engines (parts) alone could not. Biology operates similarly: There are many genes, and those genes interact with one another and the environment. Those interactions create function (health) or dysfunction (disease).
Advances in molecular and cellular knowledge steered biological research away from the whole and more toward the parts. This means biological science has moved more toward a fragmented set of reductionist and siloed efforts. While these detailed investigations have revealed fascinating insights into the details of biological complexity, it has become increasingly challenging.
With a recent explosion in gene science, we now have an opportunity to put it all together, to collaborate across scientific disciplines and institutions, with open-access tools and platforms, and with the attitude that, indeed, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In practice, we call this the systems biology approach.
Biology is complex. The need to understand this complexity drives advancements in technologies that are required to measure properties of all of the constituent parts and to understand how they interact with one another. The application of those technologies generates large amounts of data, which are analyzed using algorithms or models run on computers.
In doing so, new discoveries are made, and we move another step closer to understanding how dysfunction at the molecular level results in complex disease. Through this process, a systems biology approach can provide the knowledge required to personalize therapy based on a person’s specific genetic make-up, enabling doctors to target and tailor treatment to the uniqueness of every individual.
It might make more sense to think about this concept in terms of Google maps. We can zoom out to see our location in relation to other continents and oceans or we can zoom in to pinpoint the specific street corner on which we’re standing. The promise of the systems biology approach to research is that it gives scientists the ability to dig as deeply as they need to in order to understand biology on a molecular level – zooming in – without becoming untethered to the broader, “continental” view of life on this planet. We are all interconnected, after all.
Nitin Baliga, Ph.D., is director and senior vice president at Institute for Systems Biology, a research partner with Providence Health & Services